Islamophobia is an emerging comparative concept in the social sciences. Yet there is no widely accepted definition of Islamophobia that permits systematic comparative and causal analysis. This article explores how the term Islamophobia has been deployed in public and scholarly debates, emphasizing that these discussions have taken place on multiple registers. It then draws on research on concept formation, prejudice, and analogous forms of status hierarchies to offer a usable social scientific definition of Islamophobia as indiscriminate negative attitudes or emotions directed at Islam or Muslims. The article discusses the types of indicators that are most appropriate for measuring Islamophobia as well as the benefits of concept development for enabling comparative and causal analysis.

To better understand the public portrayal of minorities, we propose a new and systematic procedure for measuring the standing of different groups that relies on the tone of daily newspaper headlines containing the names of minority groups. This paper assesses the portrayal of Muslims in the British print media between 2001 and 2012, focusing especially on testing scholarly propositions that Muslims are depicted in a systematically negative way. We compare the tone of newspaper headlines across time and across newspaper type and compare the portrayal of Muslims to that of Jews and Christians. We do not find support for arguments that Muslims are consistently portrayed in a negative manner in the British media as a whole. However, our data demonstrate that headlines in right-leaning newspapers are more negative than those in left-leaning newspapers, and that Muslims are consistently portrayed more negatively than Jews and frequently more negatively than Christians. These findings thus offer a more nuanced understanding of British newspaper portrayals of Muslims than exists in the contemporary scholarly literature.Public perceptions of different identity groups affect not only minorities, but also societies that have a stake in promoting equality and social cohesion. Opinion polls have long been the primary means of gauging sentiments about different social groups. Yet such surveys are only conducted sporadically and they seldom use a comparable set of questions, limiting their usefulness for comparing across time, space or minority group. To complement the knowledge that can be gleaned from

Scholars of political communication have stressed the critical role of the media in modern liberal democracies (Bennett and Entman 2001;Chong and Druckman 2007; Koopmans and Statham 2010;McCombs 2004;Norris 2000). The media inform the public, provide a communicative bridge between political and social actors, influence perceptions of pressing issues, depict topics and people in particular ways and may shape individuals' political views and participation. Despite this critical role, students of migrants and minorities have rarely used systematic media analysis in their scholarship. We believe that the time is ripe to review how a focus on the media can help advance a field that traditionally has been explored with other types of data. In this special issue, we showcase a diverse set of new research to illustrate the ways in which media analysis advances our knowledge about migrants and minorities in the public sphere.Understanding the factors that shape media coverage of migrants and minorities, as well as the effect of that coverage on public attitudes, policy outcomes or social relations, has a modest but growing foundation. To further advance our knowledge, this special issue is oriented around a comparative approach. Media coverage may be copious or minimal, positive or negative, social or political. These axes of difference can be examined across time; across regions, countries or cities; between media outlets of different types, political stripes or economic ownership structures; and with reference to a wide range of migrant or minority groups and issues, spanning asylum to security, integration to racial discrimination. Comparative analysis connects

In recent years, a variety of efforts have been made in political science to enable, encourage, or require scholars to be more open and explicit about the bases of their empirical claims and, in turn, make those claims more readily evaluable by others. While qualitative scholars have long taken an interest in making their research open, reflexive, and systematic, the recent push for overarching transparency norms and requirements has provoked serious concern within qualitative research communities and raised fundamental questions about the meaning, value, costs, and intellectual relevance of transparency for qualitative inquiry. In this Perspectives Reflection, we crystallize the central findings of a three-year deliberative process—the Qualitative Transparency Deliberations (QTD)—involving hundreds of political scientists in a broad discussion of these issues. Following an overview of the process and the key insights that emerged, we present summaries of the QTD Working Groups’ final reports. Drawing on a series of public, online conversations that unfolded at www.qualtd.net, the reports unpack transparency’s promise, practicalities, risks, and limitations in relation to different qualitative methodologies, forms of evidence, and research contexts. Taken as a whole, these reports—the full versions of which can be found in the Supplementary Materials—offer practical guidance to scholars designing and implementing qualitative research, and to editors, reviewers, and funders seeking to develop criteria of evaluation that are appropriate—as understood by relevant research communities—to the forms of inquiry being assessed. We dedicate this Reflection to the memory of our coauthor and QTD working group leader Kendra Koivu.1

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